CFOG's PIP, June 1988, Volume 7 No. 4, Whole No. 66, page 61

DOS Doings

by Steve Lucius

The CFOG MS-DOS library has been growing rapidly since its release. It is up over 60 disks, the exact count isn't known as I have picked up about 10 disks worth since I last even tried to make an index. New business software in the library includes MR. Bill, an accounting system and a new version of Wampum, a dBase 3 clone. The new version of Wampum works much faster than the old an even has a few bugs fixed. The shareware version only has some of the features of the commercial version, however the author tells you how to use older versions in spite of their internal clock that makes them stop working after a certain time. In the area of drawing and CAD software we added DANCAD and PC-Draw. Under the heading of miscellaneous a disk full of Ham utilities and a pop up MS-DOS helper were added.

Also added to the library is a demo of Wordstar 5, that really needs a color monitor to use. If you have a composite monitor system like a Compac or Cordata and come up in mono mode you miss most of the demo. Other additions to the library include new versions of PKARC, ARCA and NARC for file compression that are reviewed in a separate article.

I recently learned what an instructor I had in a computer course meant when he said his religion was backup. Always backup your data. I was experimenting with a program to change the interleave on a hard drive, hopefully to speed it up. I had recently done a partial backup, with the last full one being a month before. Naturally the drive was wiped out, wouldn't even format. Fortunately between some utilities from the manufacturer and repartitioning it I got it back up, but had to restore data from floppies. It wasn't really catastrophic but I didn't do as good a job of incremental backup as I had thought, and using a one month old full backup brought up old programs I had cleaned off the drive. I wonder where the backup religion holds services? Strangely enough the drive does work a little faster after being reformatted, but not enough to justify the effort

For those with XT clones there is a good backup program in the library called ARCHIVE that is very convenient to use, but only supports 360k disks. It does nothing if you don't use it. If you do use it you need to keep a separate copy of it or any other backup program you use on a separate disk with your backups. Makes it rather awkward if the only copy you have is on the hard drive that you just wiped out. Nothing is ever idiot proof because idiots are so ingenious.

[The importance of not using the MS-DOS BACKUP and RESTORE was brought home the other day by a friend who needed to RESTORE some files to her hard disk. Since the last backup session her company had upgraded from DOS 3.1 to DOS 3.2. Her urgent requests to the system to RESTORE files from A: drive to the C: drive were met with an error message: Wrong version. We restored her files on our Kaypro 16 and used Dave Rand's NSWP to put them on a couple of floppies. Then we told her to geht the boss to pop for a copy of FASTBACK PLUS. Or try the ARCHIVE program that Steve mentions in the column above. -- bhc]